Older blog entries for CharlesGoodwin (starting at number 18)

Another busy day today. Fortunately I had a really good sleep last night, meaning I was fully recovered from a weekend of stupid drinking with old friends. I say stupid... I'd do it again and will do it some more in the future. Still, if we didn't do stupid things then we'd probably never have fun.

Being paid to work on Ibex is cool. It's a dream come true for this period of my life. I've started using an ancient app for time keeping called Time Tracker which was last updated in 1997! I did first try GnoTime but it crashed on me twice in less than 60s of usage. Thanks but no thanks. Makes me believe we should all have to dog food with our projects. Still, it looked potentially really good and I look forward to trying it more in the future.

I saw The Passion of Christ last Thursday. Gruesome. It was strangely lacking in anti-semitism given the extent of the complaints, so I felt compelled to start a forum thread about it to see if anybody would justify any anti-semitic claims. [EDIT - found an excellent overview of some of the Biblical discrepencies in the movie.]

Lots of coding to be done. I've almost fixed Box rendering and then I have widget coding to be doing. I spent a few hours last night and today setting up bugzilla over SSH for my employer which was interesting. RH9 dependency hell is not fun, especially when things like perl modules often come in differently-named packages. I'm happy with my Gentoo. Emerge!

If you have yet to, you must read Edd Dumbill's take on the platform integration with Gnome. (Y'know, the subtle Mono vs. Java vs. Parrot flamefest.) It's inspired. Absolutely inspired. And it is 100% the approach the Gnome project must take to ensure future success.

In my own hacking news, I did some sterling work on understanding the Ibex core in order to fix a bug or two. The Ibex core is quite a complex beast and I'm quite proud of myself for coming out the other side with only a few cuts and bruises with all my limbs intact.

Sadly I've not done nearly as much on the GNOME Office website as I should have done. Given that I'm afk Friday evening through to Sunday night, that'll probably not happen until next week. "Next week" again? Tomorrow seemingly never comes. (But it will!)

Oh, and apparently us Europeans are, "assaulting a successful American industry and policies that support [US] economic growth." by fining Microsoft for illegally abusing it's monopoly in order to gain and maintain their stranglehold on the market. Microsoft has made $100s of billions... if anything I would have thought the $700 million fine was a little low. Then again, I'm not a Democrat candidate for the state of Washington; home to the giant company.

I'm not sure quite how to state how awesome Gnome 2.6 is.

It just has a lovely feel to it. Things feel snappier, more polished. The interface is so clean (although so was Gnome 2.4) and things work really well.

Nautilus is so fast... is it really Nautilus? I think they kidnapped Nautilus and put his physically superior twin brother in there.

GStreamer just worked. (No configuration craziness!)

In other awesome news, what is sure to be an open source darling for years to come got an update today: The Battle for Wesnoth

Warning: don't follow that link if you value your productivity for the next week or two. And don't install the addictive Solarwolf either, another excellent open source game. In fact, there are so many great open source games; we should appreciate them more... Freeciv, Vegastrike, Boson, Stratagus (formerly Freecraft), Freecnc, Simutrans (not open source, but fun nonetheless), Pingus, Trackballs, Neverball, and many more.

Unsurprisingly, updating Gnome whilst using Gnome does funny things to your desktop experience.

Learnt enough XSL today to actually do something with it. I can't understate how awesome libxml is, the tools it provides are high quality and invaluable for any XML work.

I also made some progress with Ibex today. A few patches to the core have helped but instead I concentrated more on the structure of the widget code and made some decisions that should improve working with themes.

And a surprising but welcome development on the "how does one make money from working on Free Software" front when I received an informal approach to be paid by the hour for working on Ibex, from somebody who has been monitoring the project's progress. I really hope something comes of it.

On another note it's 2:24am. I see that staying up all night Monday really fixed my sleeping pattern. Perhaps I should just try pholyphasic sleep cycles instead. (Yeah, right.)

Just saw Mark McLoughlin's post about adding wireless support to gnome-netstatus which is cool. Calum did the UI but I wonder why the '100%' is to the right of the indicating bar graphic. Shouldn't it be to the left for English (and other left-right reading languages) since that's where our eyes naturally look first?

I wonder if that's part of the Gnome HIG. It probably is and, if in the unlikely event it isn't, probably should be.

Last night was the best sleep I've had in ages. Perhaps I should stay up all night more often as I did the night before. It certainly forces me to get to bed early the next day.

Then again I slept in 'til 9:30am when luckily a phonecall woke me up.

Must get job... or get contract work... or anything. A good few hours of cold calling. Fun fun fun!

[Didn't realise Advogato doesn't support blog titles] Am I the only person... ...that's getting annoyed by Michael Meek's constantly edited blog? I get the Gnome Planet RSS and it seems that every time Straw syncs the RSS, he's done a minor edit of his most recent blog. 20 or so times daily. Which means that whenever I'm using my computer (more than is healthy) I keep getting interrupted by a non-update. Argh!

Or am I getting the wrong end of the stick and is this a Straw or GP bug?

Either way it's damned annoying. And if it is the former, and if Michael ever reads this: you aren't limited to only one blog per day! And it needn't be perfect!

Gave myself a crash course in XSL/XML today. Found out that to merge together XML documents you need to use XInclude. It's crazy how hard it is to find out about XInclude given how useful it is.

My father once told me that I'd know I was grown up once I started to get irrationally paranoid, and that I'd know I was an adult when I recognised my responsibilites.

Whenever I use cheap shampoo I swear I get uncontrollable dandruff. I'm beginning to think it's a ploy to make you purchase the more expensive shampoos... "Pay up or accept ailments!".

I've been out of work for too long, it's time to get a job to make sure I can pay my mortgage.

Development pace has been disappointing. I made progress with Ibex, with quite a few widgets now working including a rudimentry tabpane implementation! But my GNOME Office work has been slow and I've failed (despite making promises) to deliver the website this weekend. It is now a priority.

It helps if you don't have to spend the best part of 2 hours washing dishes. At one point it felt like an insurmountable task. Battered and bruised, I only just survived.

Never let the girlfriend cook a fry-up for Sunday dinner - I spent a couple of hours recovering from severe indigestion. I never have indigestion. At least, never before now.

We've made some real headway with Ibex over the last few days. Adam finally awoke from his slumber with a mass of patching ensuing. (He'll disappear for weeks but then code in a few days more than most developers could do in a month.)

Anyway, his patches introduced a few regressions which we (myself and Tupshin) quickly backed out [3]. I know there's a few undocumented bugs still with the core that I've encountered - documenting them was difficult until some of the existing bugs were fixed - but now most of the important bugs are fixed, I should be able to isolate them over the next few days.

[1] There's quite a lot of Ibex code (code running on Ibex) involved in those simple widgets, a lot of what we need to go onto create the more complex widgets. Stuff like org.ibex.theme.base.border-img or ibex.lib.selectable which will both be widely used.

(They're just plain text files so I don't know why Epiphany is being so anal about opening them up, especially when it displays .wmv files inline as garbled text. I hope stuff like that is fixed for GNOME 2.6 which I'm eager to switch to.)

[2] Check out the antialiased text. That's freetype compiled into mips and run using mips2java at runtime. That way we can make anything that can be compiled into mips code run over Ibex. Crazy stuff but very preferrable to having to rewrite Freetype in Java.

[3] Darcs rules. It's one of those relatively unknown gems out in the Free Software world. It certainly makes our development life a lot easier than CVS or any centralised server.

As HP writes: In other news, increasing dependencies on the proprietary JDK in OO.org, which forces the codebase shipped by Red Hat, Debian, and other companies who won't rely on a JDK license from Sun to diverge more and more from the mainline. Not to mention the StarOffice vs. OpenOffice.org delta.

If ever there was a case for needing GNOME Office, that is it. Otherwise most Distributions will be finding themselves dependent upon licenses from Sun. I think Ximian backed the wrong horse with OOo. I just hope I can help the GO team prove it.

Hacking on the Ibex widgets continues. Hopefully tonight the first few widgets will be complete. A few bugs in the core, however, will prevent us from releasing a demo. There's not much I can do about that, though, than wait on and nag the core developers.